A SEEING NO SHARIA IN AMERICA— (SELF-RIGHTEOUS) IGNORANCE UBER ALLES?
It is somewhat ironic that immensely popular Fox News host Bill O’Reilly epitomizes the willful blindness to sharia encroachment in the United States. O’Reilly has been pilloried by the Left for both his undeniably accurate statements that the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on 9/11 were committed by Muslims, and more broadly, his commonsensical recognition of the global plethora of jihad-related “Muslim problems” outside the United States.96 Nonetheless, O’Reilly is in lockstep with his media and political antagonists when it comes to glib, ignorant denial—mindslaughter— regarding the pervasive support for sharia by mainstream Islamic religious organizations, and Muslim religious leaders, in America.
O’Reilly’s personal see-no-sharia mindslaughter was displayed vividly when he offered to wield a hammer on behalf of the Ground Zero Mosque project.— His statement98 revealed a basic ignorance of mosque promoter Feisal Rauf's expressed ideology, including the imam's sharia-based conception of “peace” itself— more accurately, a global Pax Islamica.
There is nothing “nuanced” about Imam Feisal Rauf's belief in the primacy of sharia in society—any society—despite its permanent advocacy of jihad and dehumanizing injunctions on non-Muslims and women.
Rauf, in his 2004 What’s Right with Islam99— released in Malaysia as, A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da’wah from the Heart of America Post-9/11,— asserts that the United States is in a state of “readiness” for the sharia:
[T]he American political structure is Shariah compliant, for a state inhabited predominantly by Muslims neither defines nor makes it synonymous with an Islamic state.101
And Rauf also charts how the United States could evolve toward what is clearly his ultimate goal—an Islamic state—beginning with a parallel sharia judiciary:
[It] also would not be a violation of church-state separation to have a subsidiary entity within judiciary that employs religious jurists...to comment on the compliance of certain decisions...to provide guidance on how Shariah compliant these decisions are..
It can become truly Islamic only by virtues of a conscious application of the sociopolitical tenets of Islam to the life of the national, and by an incorporation of those tenets in the basic constitution of the country.102However it is Rauf's earlier 1999 Islam: A Sacred Law: What Every Muslim Should Know about Sharia which makes unmistakably clear both the triumphal basis for his pious Muslim desire to impose Islamic law, and the far-reaching effects of this application:
God's role in the explicit philosophical construct of the law makes a big difference between the modus operandi of a righteous Muslim judge in a Muslim court and a righteous Western judge in a Western court. The judge who sits in judgment in an Islamic court sits in lieu of God as His worldly representative [khalifa] and is held responsible by God to His values. The Muslim judge explicitly “reports to God.” The judge who sits in a Western court is only explicitly responsible to the Constitution, the interpretations of a civil law and its rules.... And since a Shariah is understood as a law with God at its center, it is not possible in principle to limit the Shariah to some aspects of human life and leave out others.. The Shariah thus covers every field of law— public and private, national and international—together with enormous amounts of material that Westerners would not regard as law at all, because the basis of the Shariah is the worship of, and obedience to, God through good works and moral behavior. Following the Sacred Law thus defines the Muslim's belief in God.103
Pace witless, apologetic assessments by non-Muslim public intellectuals and talking heads, irrespective of their political ideology, Imam Rauf's unabashed support for a holistic application of sharia reflects the prevailing attitudes—and goals—of the US Muslim community. Confirmatory evidence of this widespread, dangerous American Muslim phenomenon abounds, despite being almost universally, and willfully, ignored —from ominous polling data, to jihad funding trial revelations and the content of more banal Muslim litigation proceedings, mosque surveillance reports, analyses of Islamic education institutions and their Muslim schoolchildren’s textbooks, the issuance of obscurantist “fatwas” (Islamic legal rulings) by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and finally, an open declaration by one of America’s largest mainstream Muslims organizations, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), in its 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book, calling for the (re-)creation of a global Muslim Caliphate, and the imposition of sharia law in America.
Salient details from these illustrative examples include:• Data (compiled here104) from an April 2001 survey performed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealing that 69 percent of American Muslims in America affirmed that it was “absolutely fundamental” or “very important” to have Salafi (i.e., fundamentalist Islamic) teachings at their mosques, while 67 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “America is an immoral, corrupt society.”105 Another poll conducted in Detroit-area mosques during 2003 found that 81 percent of the respondents endorsed the application of the sharia where Muslims comprised a majority.
• An internal Muslim Brotherhood statement dated May 22, 1991, whose contents were revealed during the Texas Holy Land Foundation jihadterrorism funding trial.106 Written by an acolyte of the Brotherhood’s major theoretician, lionized Qatari cleric, popular Al Jazeera television personality, and head of the European Fatwa Council Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the document titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” is indeed self-explanatory:
The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.107
• The Mapping Shariah Project's initial findings from one hundred mosques randomly selected across the United States testing the hypothesis that sharia adherence within mosques (including, among many other factors, gender separation, clothing, male facial hair, jewelry, strictness on alignment shoulder-to-shoulder during prayer, etc.) would correlate with incitement to jihadism, revealed:
o 75 percent of the mosques are sharia-adherent (on a scale of 1 to 10, they are 7 or higher).
o 25 percent of the mosques were very low shariaadherent (1 to 2 on the scale).
o The correlation between sharia adherence and the use of literature calling for violence against the infidel and apostate and jihad was 0.9—an almost 1:1 relationship.
o In most mosques where this violent literature was found, the imam actively encouraged the
Mapping Shariah Project's researcher posing as a new attendee to study this violent material.108
• A provisional inquiry by the Public Policy Alliance uncovered seventeen instances in eleven states of American judges accepting “input” from sharia in rendering judgments,109 including an odious, widely publicized New Jersey ruling that upheld sharia-sanctioned marital rape.110 Appellate court intervention was required to reverse this ruling in July 2010—Western legal norms prevailing over the sharia—with the presiding judge soberly concluding that the Muslim husband's “.conduct in engaging in nonconsensual sexual intercourse was unquestionably knowing, regardless of his view that his [Islamic] religion permitted him to act as he did.”111 Completely ignored at the time of these New Jersey proceedings was the fact that marital rape is not recognized as criminal, that is, it is sanctioned, by a fatwa of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America! (See below.)
• Investigations of textbooks widely used in the New
York City-area Islamic schools, as well as the Islamic Saudi Academy of Fairfax, Virginia, which discovered the inculcation of sharia supremacism, including sacralized disparagement and hatred of non-Muslims, especially Jews.112 When
questioned for the March 30, 2003, New York Daily News story113 on New York-area Islamic school textbooks, Yahiya Emerick, head of a Queensbased nonprofit curriculum development project for the Islamic Foundation of North America, defended the language in these books, denying they were inflammatory. Emerick opined,
Islam, like any belief system, believes its program is better than others. I don’t feel embarrassed to say that..
[The books] are directed to kids in a Muslim educational environment. They must learn and appreciate there are differences between what they have and what other religions teach. It’s telling kids that we have our own tradition.114• The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America
(AMJA), whose mission statement maintains the organization was, “founded to provide guidance for Muslims living in North America.. AMJA is a religious organization that does not exploit religion to achieve any political ends, but instead provides practical solutions within the guidelines of Islam and the nation’s laws to the various challenges experienced by Muslim communities,”115 is accepted as such by the mainstream American Muslim community.116 Notwithstanding this mainstream acceptance, including uncritical endorsement117 of its recent seventh annual American conference in Houston (October 15-18, 2010)— to train American imams, AMJA has issued rulings which sanction the killing of apostates,119 “blasphemers” (including non
Muslims guilty of this “crime”),120 or adulterers (by stoning to death)121 and condone marital rape.122
• Finally, as reported by the Investigative Project on Terrorism,123 the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), one of the largest mainstream US Muslim organizations, in its 2010 ICNA Member's Hand Book, openly acknowledges being the American branch of a global jihadist phenomenon referred to as the “Islamic Movement.”124 The 2010 handbook observes that branches of this movement “are active in various parts of the world to achieve the same objectives. It is our obligation as Muslims to engage in the same noble cause here in North America.”125 These efforts will culminate in the (re-)creation of a transnational Islamic superstate, the Caliphate, under the sharia:
the united Muslim Ummah [community] in a united Islamic state, governed by an elected khalifah in accordance with the laws of shari’ah.—